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“Let’s go see Gene and Booda,” I tell my little dog Bobby. He knows the routine. Out the cabin door, hang a right, and run fast to their back door. We’ve got a key.

We knock twice on the window in the door. Never three times, or four. Never on the wood. The sound carries better from the tempered glass. We want Gene and Booda to know it is us with our two knocks, and we want them to hear us at the door. Because we always just go ahead and let ourselves in the door.

Soon as the door opens (and this is the way it always goes), Bobby dashes in, taking the lead. “Hey, Bobby,” Gene says, sort of singing it, as he always does. First thing I see, after pulling the door closed behind me, are Gene’s tennis shoes. His recliner is tilted back and his feet are up, and I say, “Hey, Gene,” as I come around the corner. I extend my hand to meet Gene’s. He says, “Hey, Sonny,” and we sort of give each other a light squeeze of the fingers. We are men well past the need for some white knuckle grip test.

Bobby’s already disappearing into the kitchen where Booda gives him a little Milk Bone treat. I always sit in the chair facing Gene. But I wait before I sit until Booda comes into the parlor and I give her a hug. “Hey, darlin’,” she says. This time, she goes back into the kitchen. I can smell something good cooking and she’s got work to do in there.

Gene’s got the Braves game on. He picks up the remote and mutes the sound. Bobby joins me on my lap and Gene and I catch up on nothing special. Just a little talk, a regular old visit. Earlier Gene had driven his truck into town and picked up some groceries. We talked about getting his truck to the shop soon for a new timing belt. I’d already got a price and we just needed to do some coordinating on dropping off and picking up. In the mirror above the love seat I can see the baseball players moving around on the TV screen. Booda comes in and sits in her usual chair to my left.

When it’s time to go, Bobby senses it and jumps down and stares at me from the floor, both ears straight up, waiting. I tell him to hold up and say to Gene I’ll be going out of town Thursday. It is Monday. He reaches to the table beside his chair and picks up his calendar and a pen. “Let me get this down,” he says. The reason Gene wants to set down my itinerary is because he wants to know when I will be back. I want him to know when I will be back. That’s the way we do it when I go out of town.

So I tell Gene what I’ve got on my schedule. A visit to the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium in Columbus, Mississippi, over the coming weekend. Some VA appointments in Tuscaloosa during the coming week, hanging out with my sister there the following week while waiting to do a book reading and signing in Birmingham, on stage with Gene’s daughter Suzanne and son-in-law Joe. “Then I’ll be home,” I say.

“What day will you be back?” Because if I’m not back on the day I say I’ll be back, I will get a text message from Gene. “When u coming home?” On the calendar he will write “Sonny back”. But in the text he never asks, “When will you be back?” He wants to know when I will be home. And I like the way he puts it.

I get up and Booda stands up for a hug. Bobby is already at the back door. Gene tilts his recliner. I walk over and give the toe of Gene’s shoe a wiggle. “I’ll see you again before I take off.”

“Okay, Sonny,” Gene said.

But it didn’t work out that way. Suzanne texted me Tuesday morning at 8:39 to say that Gene died. He had got up, got dressed, tied his shoes, said good morning to Booda, made a pot of coffee and poured a cup. Booda was in the kitchen with him when he passed. Gene had survived a heart attack years earlier, and beat back cancer twice. That’s so he could, as Suzanne said, “leave on his own terms.”

When I got my head settled and my eyes refocused, I went to reopen Suzanne’s text. On the cell screen right beneath Suzanne’s name was Gene’s name, and I opened that one. A text from him an hour after I’d walked out to say I had a package there. Gene always brought my mail to his house from the line of mailboxes down the street, and it’s a good reason for me to drop in.

I texted back, “I’ll come over.”

Gene texted back, “Ok.”

That’s not an engaging exchange between two men. But Gene went on to his long home, and he didn’t take his phone. He won’t need it. I won’t erase his message, because it’s a whole and complete story of loving someone right now while you have the chance.

I need that message. So, yes, I will keep Gene’s text.

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Sitting Bojangles, ready to ride, on my grandfather’s farm. That’s my brother Frankie’s horse, Kojak, standing in the background, reins dangling. I can’t remember, but I bet Frankie slid out of the saddle and snapped this picture with a Kodak Instamatic. My sister Sandra also took to horses, even marrying a farrier, and rode a champion quarter horse named Badger Bill Cody in Western Pleasure class.

Fifty years ago, I was, for a short time, a long-haired collegiate cowboy. It was 1969, I was 20, and John Travolta wouldn’t introduce us to urban cowboys for another decade. Aligning with the collegiate variety simply meant I was in college, flunking out, and found I’d rather be riding horses. While the urban set hung out in country music dance bars dressed up in boots and jeans, topped off with a cowboy hat, and rode mechanical bulls.

I, too, liked to saddle up on my share of barstools. Particularly those anchored in the vicinity of a pool table at the Chukker just off-campus in Tuscaloosa. I’d rather drink draft beer and shoot 8-Ball than go to class. Just about anything would do to keep me out of a textbook. And my grades proved it. All that old hippie angst floating around in the late ‘60s caught some long-haired young men like me in a fog of existential funk. We were wading knee-deep in questions without concrete answers, and wondering what the hell was the point of going to college when the world waiting after seemed such a crazy and empty reward.

But, the Vietnam War’s body count of guys my age was climbing toward 60,000 and college deferments kept men out of the draft. So it didn’t make much sense that I was losing mine as surely as Bear Bryan’s Crimson Tide was favored to win its next football game.

I truly didn’t know, back then, whether I was washing or hanging out. That was in the days of drying clothes hung out on a line in the sun and shaking in the wind.

Then I bought an old horse. And soon as I pointed my toes downward into the embroidered leather of a pair of high-heeled, pointy-toed cowboy boots, the ground underneath me hardened up some, like I could trust it to not give way under my feet. Oddly, it was also easier to smile just to be smiling.

It happened one weekend that I’d driven down to my grandfather’s place west of Millport, and found a couple of my maternal uncles hooked up to a trailer and jumping into a pickup. Jimmy and Terry, who was nicknamed Festus and who still today loves to watch that namesake character on Gunsmoke, along with other round-the-clock classic westerns, were heading for Livingston to look at buying another horse.

“C’mon, Uncle Bunky,” Festus said, calling me by the nickname he gave me after a local TV personality who drew cartoons for kids on an afterschool show. Like him, I could draw cartoons and all manner of things. Festus still calls me Uncle Bunky. I still call him Festus, this uncle of mine who’s three years younger than me. I piled into the truck, sliding across the seat to sit between my uncles.

Standing in the pasture with the horse that Jimmy had traveled there to buy, was a scruffy old swayback horse. I looked at him and he looked at me. I asked, “What’ll you take for that one?”

“I’ll take the same 50 bucks I can get for him at the slaughter house. Which is where he’s headed.” (Today, I’m reading about a Kentucky Derby-winning thoroughbred that traded hands for $60 million to $70 million. That’s a fancy price. Just sayin’. And, the horse’s name is also appropriately fancy, Fusaichi Pegasus.)

“I’ll take him.” Festus and Jimmy shook their heads. They grinned, and damn well loved it that I bought the sad horse. I immediately named him Bojangles, ‘cause I figured he had some dance left in him. He just needed a partner.

We loaded Bojangles and Jimmy’s new horse and drove home. On the way back, I was set at ease that they’d pasture my horse, and put out feed for him that I’d buy. Next day, on a tip from Festus, I bought a secondhand saddle, a bridle and reins. And by late afternoon, I had on a cowboy hat and was slow-riding my horse, taking to old roadbeds through the woods, and cutting across grassy pastures and fields around my grandfather’s farm.

Bojangles was done with striking a trot, cared not a tinker’s damn for rolling into a gallop. He shook his head and flubbered his lips when the young horses twitched and begged for loose reins and a heel in the flank so they could run full out, racing over hills, leaning into mud-slinging turns while their riders hung on to their hats. Bojangles was a slow-walking softshoe kind of ride. Satisfied to be the old man in the bunch.

Something happened in that saddle with Bojangles under me. Riding him smoothed out some of my wrinkles, helped ease my mind about what might be coming around the bend. It’s like he coaxed me to just listen to the music and learn to dance, to move through it all just the same way he and I went along, at an easy pace. A horse and rider working together to get no place special.

Bojangles must’ve schooled me better than the professors in Tuscaloosa, ‘cause I spent more time with him than with them. Made up my mind to take a break from homework and tests, get out of my head and into my hands and feet, put my butt in a saddle instead of in a chair at a desk. And I also bought a fast quarter horse and named her Susie and put her in the pasture with Bojangles so I could ride barrel races with Festus on his shiny black filly named Penny. And we rode with his band of merry outlaw cowboys through that summer, fall, and winter of 1968. Then in the spring of ’69, with some odd newfound sense of purpose, I left college and joined the navy. My brother Frankie took Susie.

Festus let Bojangles just hang out with his trophy-winning Penny. He stayed back in sight of the barn, swishing his tail at flies, watching clouds drift by and nibbling on grass and hay, while Penny was at local rodeos outrunning other quarter horses. Then some neighbors came by one day and wondered “reckon would that old horse let kids ride?” Festus told’em that horse would like nothing better and was free for the taking, and Bojangles earned himself one last saddle job.

He’d have been proud of me, coming home a veteran on the GI Bill and back at the university, making good grades, learning to write stories. I guess Bojangles figured there’d be a few lines about him in due course. Yep. Thanks, and here’s to you, old man. I owe you.

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The young filly, a golden palomino, sees you at the gate. She is a fifty yards away, halfway between you and your grandfather’s barn that stands silhouette on a low shortgrass hill behind her. Her flaxen coat is shiny slick in the midday sun, head up, still chewing the mouthful of grass she tore loose from the ground in front of her hooves.

She stares, standing still as a fence post. Your arms are folded, resting on the top board, which is even with your bare shoulders. It is the edge of summer, and you are eleven. You don’t move, or make a sound, only look back at her. You study her, she studies you, like two who might know each other—but maybe not. An irregular blaze divides her face and finishes in a point on her nose. You think she’s beautiful.

Then, not aloud, only in your mind, you call her. With pure intention. “Dolly! Com’ere!”

She shakes her blonde mane, like cirrus drapery, and flicks her tail and looks away. But then she fixes her sights on you and starts walking toward you. She lowers her head a little as she closes the distance. Slow and steady, right up to the gate. You step back and she puts her muzzle just over on your side of the fence, then she settles her chin and rests her cheek on the board.

“You heard me, didn’t you?” You ask Dolly.

Her voice in your head answers clear as the cloudless blue sky. “And you hear me, don’t you?” You go wide-eyed, and smile. You look side to side, both ways. Over your shoulder. You’re alone.

She twitches her ears and flubbers her lips, that sound of exasperation a working man might make when the work’s not going right. “But, who, now? Who besides the yellow sun,” Dolly wonders, “are you going to tell?” Then she rounds-up and walks back toward the barn.

You see the distant figure that is your grandfather come around the corner of the barn. His shoulders are sloped with the weight of a bushel basket in his arms, and you know there is corn in the basket, ears he’s just shucked for Dolly.